No, Mark Zuckerberg hasn’t vowed to stop the Yulin Dog Festival. Hoax

A Facebook post is spreading across the social media website claiming CEO Mark Zuckerberg has agreed to help stop the controversial Yulin Dog Meat Festival if the post can accumulate over 50k likes, shares and comments.

The post – published from a page called Puppies Planet – can be seen below –

Hey Mark! I doubt you will ever take this seriously or even reply. But how many likes would it take for you to help stop the Yuling Dog Meat Eating Festival in China? I will screenshot and post!
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Hey Puppies Planet that is a pretty strong request you have asked. But I will give you and every dog lover this chance. You will have to get 50k likes 50k comments, 50k shares. – Mark

For those who would like to know if the post is genuine, it’s not. It’s fake. In fact this appears to be one of the latest examples of a new type of like-farming technique (getting shares, comments and followers using deception or exploitation) whereas the post will purport to offer something [good] on the condition that a post can accumulate a certain amount of engagement.

In this case the post is purporting to offer Mark Zuckerberg’s help ending the Yulin Dog Meat Festival, if the post gets over 50k shares, likes and comments.

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Only last week (from the time of writing) a near-identical post was spreading claiming that Zuckerberg would remove Donald Trump from Facebook if a post got over 20k shares and 500k likes – the wording of which is almost the same as the example here.

Unsurprisingly, Zuckerberg isn’t going to condition such an important decision [of whether to support or censor a controversial dog meat festival] on such a trivial condition concerning how much engagement a Facebook post receives. The notion is absurd. This is ultimately just a con to trick people into engaging on a Facebook post and following a Facebook page, in this case the page is Puppies Planet, who are inevitably getting a surge in new followers since posting the ruse.

While the page itself seems harmless – it just posts images and videos of dogs – it is still engaging in a dishonest like-farming techniques, and as such we recommend not interacting with the page or its posts.

Learn more about like-farming on our blog post here.